PHILOSOPHY – Hegel

Georg Friedrich Hegel was born in Stuttgart in 1770. Intellectually he was adventurous, but in externals, respectable, conventional, and proud of it. He ascended the academic tree and reached the top most branch, head of the University of Berlin, when he was sixty years old; he died the following year. Hegel wrote some very long and very famous books, among them, “The Phenomenology of Spirit”, “The Science of Logic”, and “Elements of the Philosophy of Right”; but, we’ll be frank: he wrote horribly; his work is confusing and complicated when it should be clear and direct. He tapped into a weakness of human nature: to be trustful of grave-sounding, incomprehensible prose. This has made philosophy much weaker in the world than it should be, and it’s made it much harder for us to hear the valuable things that Hegel has to say to us, amongst which a small number of lessons stand out. Firstly, important part of ourselves can be found in history. In Hegel’s day, a standard European Way of looking at the past was to consider it as primitive, and to feel proud of how much progress has been made to get us to the modern age. But in his book, “The Phenomenology of Spirit”, published in 1807, Hegel argued that every era can be looked at as a repository of a particular kind of wisdom. This means we need to go back in time to rescue things which have gone missing. So, for example, we might need to mine history of ancient Greece to fully grasp the idea of what community can be, something which has been lost in the modern age. Or, the Middle Ages can teach us, as no other era can, about the role of honor, even if this period featured appalling attitudes to children or the rights of women. “Progress is never linear”, Hegel tells us; “there is wisdom at every stage”, “which”, says Hegel “points us to the task of the historian.” “To be a historian is to be someone who should rescue, from the past, those ideas that’re most needed” “to compensate for the blind spots of the present.” Secondly, learn from ideas you dislike. Hegel was a great believer in learning from one’s intellectual enemies, from points of view we disagree with, or that feel alien. That’s because he held, “the bits of the truth are always getting scattered even in unappealing, or peculiar places,” “and we should dig them out by asking always, ‘what sliver of sense and reason might be contained in otherwise frightening or foreign phenomena?'”. Nationalism, for instance, has had many terrible manifestations even in Hegel’s day, but Hegel’s move was to ask what underlying good idea or important need might be hiding within the bloody history of nationalism. He proposed that it’s the need for people to feel proud of where they come from, to identify with something beyond merely their own achievements, and to anchor their identities beyond the ego. Hegel is a hero of the thought that really important ideas may be in the hands of people you regard, at first glance, as beneath contempt. Thirdly, Progress is Messy Hegel believed the world makes progress, but only by lurching from one extreme to another. As it seeks to overcompensate for a previous mistake. He proposed that it generally take three moves. Before the right balance on any issue can be found. A process that he named the DIALEKTIK. He was often thinking of the complex twist and turns that brought about the modern state. We can also think the slow path towards sensible attitudes to sex in our own time. The Victorians impose too much repression, yet the 1960s may have turn out to be too liberal. It might only be by 2020s that we`ll find the right balance between extremes. All this can seem the most appalling waste of time, but Hegel insists that the painful stepping from era to era is inevitable. Something we must expect and reconcile ourselves to when planning our lives or contemplating history books. And sometimes in this process of moving from era to era we`ll find a new solution, that manages to synthesize the good qualities of the previous solutions, to make something really new, and different and better. Four, Art has a purpose. Hegel vigorously rejected the idea of art for art sake. Painting, Music, Architecture, Literature and Design: all have a major job to do. We need them so that important insights can become powerful and helpful in our lives. Art is in Hegel`s formulation: “the sensuous presentation of ideas”. Just knowing ideas often leaves us cold. for example in theory we believe the conflict in Syria is an important one. In practice however we just switch off. In principle we know we should be more forgiving to our partners, but this abstract conviction gets forgotten at the least provocation. The point of art Hegel realized, is not so much to come up with startling new strange ideas but to take the good, helpful, important thoughts we already think we know, and make them stick more imaginatively in our minds. Five. We need new institutions. Hegel took a very positive view of institutions and of the power then can wield. This is a point Hegel made again and again in different ways. For ideas to be active and effective in the world, a lot more is needed then the ideas are simply correct; to make major truths powerful in society they need employees and building and budgets and legal advices; institutions allow for the scale of time and power the big projects need to become effective in the world. So, as new needs of a society get recognized, they should ideally lead not just to new books but to the formation of new institutions. Nowadays we might say we need major new institutions to focus on relationships, consumer education, career choice, mood management and how to bring up less damaged children. Hegel help us to see valuable insights what we might initially resist them, in art in institutions in the ideas of our enemies and in the strange mistakes of the past. His insight is the growth requires that clash of divergent ideas and therefore that will be painful and slow. But at least once we know this we don`t have to compound our troubles by thinking them abnormal. Hegel gives us a more accurate and hence more manageable view of ourselves, our difficulties and where we are in history.

when mentioning sexual morality documentaries like these always characterise the victorians as an example of sexual repression and the 1960s as a period of promiscuity and drug abuse, when the opposite is actually true, the victorians of middle and upper classes pretended to have these values but there was widespread promiscuity ( one in six houses in London were brothels ) and all drugs were legal and readily available from the local chemist, where the hippy free love movement of the 1960s was a relatively small proportion of the population.

The idea that I like the most in Hegel’s philosophy is about the relationships, when he says that a relationship is the projection of the self in the other that determine the relation. That idea had followed me ever since I read about it.

YES! Point #3 is a concept I have been obsessed with for years, and I'm so glad to find I'm not just going crazy thinking about it in my "pendulum hypothesis" of human behaviour. So nice to find likeminded characters in history.

I ended up after many years watching human behaviour, at different system levels, partly with the same conclusions as in the Hegel's Dialektic.My adds on (copyright…:):The overall process resembles the time evolution of a controlled system, with its overshoots in both directions vs. the final asymptote.The reason for the overshoot relies in the egocentric and opportunistic behaviour of each part, of each actor.There's often as well a considerable myopia by the actor that triggers the specific historical event. This actor, when myopia is absent, is anyway overwhelmed by the aggressive determination for obtaining a positive change for his part, as a poorly evolved market characteristic, with a win-loose approach full of manipulation, and always asking for more than you expect to get.There's no real impartial (super partes) actor in society apparently and especially if one of the two sides is willing to embody it, unless there's a real enlightened body that thinks long terms. This, as an example, is particularly true in human history for feminism.

Sterotypes exist for a reason, they are safe. And you see them everywhere, rich moms in big SUVs, bikers being tough guys in all black, etc. etc. You don't so much see tough guys in all black in big fancy SUV's and rich moms on motorcycles acting tough. People in society like their place because it's safe and accepted in their culture by others. This is why so many people act on auto-pilot throughout a day. These safe sterotypes are good when life is complex/confusing, cause it affirms truth/reliability to you, but lack when evolving or being creative. The flip side is TOO loosy goosy and TOO risky! Being too creative, opinionated, weird that you disconnect from others and from life's truths. It's very much about a balance when interacting, and that balance is determined by what your goals you want to achive are. If my goal was I don't wanna look like a pussy to this biker gang, maybe being a rich SUV mom is not a good approach. It's all up to you!

1.Why is Hegel flying a Sodomite parachute? 2.If his writing could have been "clear and direct", it would have been. 3.How does this narrator gauge that philosophy is weaker today than it should be?? 4.There is no such thing as "gone missing". Try, "disappeared".

"Hegel, a banal, void, disgusting and ignorant charlatan who mixes insanity and nonsense with unprecedented arrogance, what his partisans convey as if it were immortal wisdom held to be true by idiots … condemned to ruin a whole generation of intellectuals "

If you are interested in Hegels view on history, I recommend you the tragedy of man by Imre Madách, a relatively short drama where Lucifer attempts to make Adam commit suicide by showing him the future of humanity. It has a bit bitter feeling because of the plot, but it is a good presentation of the thesis-antithesis-synthesis system.

Hegel is one of my favourite philosophers of all time! It is so annoying when someone is trying to back up his/her view with history but they only have fragments of information on the topic. This goes for both left and the right, and the best is when they call each other ignorant, which they both are.

Um…this is nice but you left out the most important and controversial of his ideas and the one that has manipulated more masses of people than possibly any other control tool in existence. How odd. I have to give you a BIG thumbs down for this discrepancy.

Now, Hegel was a great thinker: Thesis; Antithesis, Synthesis! This is the way it all works. And yes: Art is political. . . It has always been political. . . It will always be political: Is "HIP-HOP" not political? You're damn right it is!

Hegel wrote and taught, keeping in mind, that his subject matter was such that he would not and could not be understood in a small reading over a short period of time and so purposefully used obscurity tothrow off the opportunists and cliche peddlers.

Wow, this has given me a different perspective on Hegelian Dialectic. Definitely going to use SOME of what he suggested moving forward!

Though I know there is a lot more to him and his philosophy than this video explained. People who watch this… Do more research, than just YouTube videos as well. But I appreciate the maker of the video.

I might be wrong but I think the school of life take on philosophers is awfully cherry picked and fails to show the consequences these philosophers and their philosophies had on history (Nazi and Communism out of Hegel idea of state for example!)

More than any other philosopher, Hegel gave rise of Marxism, socialism and with his theory of dialectics (unity of opposite) helped create the physical principle of symmetry that led to Dirac's prediction of positron/electron and thus formulate unity of GR and QM.

Can't blame Hegel for bad writing in Philosophy. If anyone, blame lies with Plato, who began the systemizing trend, then magnified by the Church fathers. If you have a wholly invented contained system of logic (which has no or little anchor in reality), sky's the limit on the internal rules that you can invent for it, and so sky's the limit on the internal rules you invent for it.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (August 27, 1770 – November 14, 1831) was a German philosopher and an important figure of German idealism. He achieved wide recognition in his day and—while primarily influential within the continental tradition of philosophy—has become increasingly influential in the analytic tradition as well. Although Hegel remains a divisive figure, his canonical stature within Western philosophy is universally recognized. Hegel's principal achievement was his development of a distinctive articulation of idealism, sometimes termed absolute idealism, in which the dualisms of, for instance, mind and nature and subject and object are overcome. His philosophy of spirit conceptually integrates psychology, the state, history, art, religion and philosophy. His account of the master–slave dialectic has been highly influential, especially in 20th-century France. Of special importance is his concept of spirit (Geist, sometimes also translated as "mind") as the historical manifestation of the logical concept and the "sublation" (Aufhebung, integration without elimination or reduction) of seemingly contradictory or opposing factors: examples include the apparent opposition between necessity and freedom and between immanence and transcendence. Hegel has been seen in the 20th century as the originator of the thesis, antithesis, synthesis triad, but as an explicit phrase it originated with Johann Gottlieb Fichte. Hegel has influenced many thinkers and writers whose own positions vary widely. Karl Barth described Hegel as a "Protestant Aquinas" while Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote that "all the great philosophical ideas of the past century—the philosophies of Marx and Nietzsche, phenomenology, German existentialism, and psychoanalysis—had their beginnings in Hegel."

Reminds me of Neil deGrasse Tyson speaking on the accelerating space that goes out of our horizon. Because of the cradle of conveniences modern society provides, which eliminates a lot of human experiences, there are possibly many wisdoms that are loss to us, probably permanently.